We have come to a crossroads in America today. For years, we all believed that the political left held a different, albeit wrong interpretation of the Constitution. We believed, as they told us this, that they saw it as a living document, which would better serve us as it adapted to the new technologies and majority opinions of the day. We on the right viewed it as a document in which current technologies and majority opinions should have no effect on its interpretation. Our belief is that the Constitution provides a framework designed to impose certain very specific limitations upon the government and to insure that no ruling class ever be permitted an unaccountable infliction of its will upon the citizens of this country. Time Magazine this week let the cat out of the bag. Their cover story, written by their top editor argues that the Constitution should just flat out be scrapped. Since Dr. Sowell is far smarter and a much better writer than myself, I’ll let him carry the load of this rebuttal.
Read Thomas Sowell’s piece at Investor’s Business Daily by clicking this link.
The American Revolution was not simply a rebellion against the King of England, it was a rebellion against being ruled by kings in general. That is why the opening salvo of the Revolution was called “the shot heard round the world.”
Autocratic rulers and their subjects heard that shot — and things that had not been questioned for millennia were now open to challenge. As the generations went by, more and more autocratic governments around the world proved unable to meet that challenge.
Some clever people today ask whether the U.S. has really been “exceptional.” You couldn’t be more exceptional in the 18th century than to create your fundamental document by opening with the momentous words, “We the people.”
Those words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as human livestock, destined to be shepherded by their betters. To this day, elites who think that way — including many among the intelligentsia as well as political messiahs — find the Constitution a pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and presumptions on the rest of us.
In Mr. Stengel’s rehash of this argument, he declares: “People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today.”
Maybe that kind of talk goes on where he hangs out. But most people have enough common sense to know that a constitution does not exist to micromanage particular “events” or express opinions about the passing scene.
A constitution exists to create a framework for government — and our Constitution tries to keep the government inside that framework.
As for the erroneous, Mr. Stengel says, “If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it certainly doesn’t say so.” Apparently he has not read the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Last weekend, I was listening in on some very dear liberal friends discussing the Constitution. They were commenting on the fact that the Constitution had grown beyond its literal interpretation to fit the views and beliefs of those charged with its interpretation. The founders were very clear however in their views and explained such in a group of papers that they themselves authored. Between the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified, those men of vision who wrote the thing had to sell its concept to the citizens of the failing Confederacy which made up our nation at the time. These writings are called the Federalist Papers, and are located in their original forms in the library of congress. A link to the congressional library can be found in the right side bar on the home page of this blog. In reading those papers, you will discover that the founding fathers were more interested in establishing a government which would prevent any one person or class from establishing themselves as a ruling elite and thereby inflicting their will upon us. These were not men who wanted undue government regulation to make the work of governing a business unto itself. They were humble farmers and tradesmen who only wished to be left to determine their own destinies free from the tyranny of a ruling class elite inflicting its will upon them.
Our Constitution does matter. Our nation is exceptional. It was after all the first nation to be governed solely by the consent of its citizens. The Constitution guarantees that this consent will always be necessary for any who hold authority to exercise that authority. Our government may have grown fat indeed, and it may have even become a monster compared to anything envisioned in even the wildest nightmares of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, or Monroe, but it is still possible for ordinary citizens to affect real change and to indeed do something about that which they do not like. When I was younger, I used to read and quote Time, and I felt it to be a respectable source. Those days are gone. I would not walk across the street to receive a free copy of that worthless magazine today. Our Constitution you see, it allows for me to receive my news and opinion from a multitude of sources, which is really quite exceptional if you think about it.
